The Statue Ate My Homework

I had a Twitter conversation the other day with someone who was complaining about conservative racists. I shared this little graphic with him.

He was actually sane and we had a pleasant discussion. In the end, we followed each other and agreed that the goal was a color-blind society. He was willing to admit that the vast majority of conservatives were not racist. I had some help from another person on Twitter who, fortunately, took a gentle approach to the thing. It was all good

Still, it made me think about what was happening. The racialist used the now-familiar trope of tiki torch-waving, racist nutjobs as examples of all conservatives. After I pointed out that using a self-selecting, fringe group of, say, 100 people as indicative of what's happening with 350,000,000+ people was a bad idea, I started wondering just why any of us ever saw them as representative of something larger.

Why do the tiki goons and statues and flags get all that press? It's a giant misdirection play.

If we ever stopped focusing on racism, we'd have to confront sexual morality. The real problem is babies before marriage, not statues. The racism cant isn't about people of color, it's about us not wanting to talk about the birds and the bees.

At 75% illegitimacy, a culture is simply screwed. No one can get ahead because no one has two dedicated parents to teach the self-denial and self-control. The parents can't take time off work to improve their skills and get better jobs. Parents can't make it to conferences with teachers. Young men grow up without discipline and fall back into violence and crime. It's what men do in the absence of discipline and expectations. See also: Illiterate German barbarians sacking Rome instead of building Berlin.

So we talk about statues and flags and who might have said the Forbidden Word eighteen years ago while drunk at a cocktail party as a magician's trick. We all look here at the distraction instead of there where the switcheroo is taking place. We keep doing it because we start our conversations with the topics handed to us by the media, the academy and entertainment.

If you want a better world, you need a better culture. Statues, flags and a hundred nitwits aren't the problem. Our inability to discuss the realities of biology and parenting is.